Ferdinando Eboli is a Gothic tale written by Mary Shelley and published in The Keepsake for 1829. It is set in Italy during the Napoleonic Wars and tells the story of an Italian man named Count Ferdinando Eboli whose identity is stolen by his illegitimate older brother.
Count Ferdinando Eboli is about to leave his home in Naples to fight for his king, King Murat (Gioacchino), but before he leaves he pays a farewell visit to his fiancée Adalinda, and her father, the Marchese Spina. After he leaves, Adalinda is musing over her love for him when she hears a noise beneath her window, and is surprised to see Ferdinand there. He climbs up into her room and asks for a lock of her hair, but he cuts his hand while snipping it. She binds his hand with one of her ribbons, and he departs.
Ferdinand is stationed in northern Italy and is sent on an important mission by Gioacchino. While performing this mission, Ferdinand is ambushed and taken to a remote shack, where he is given peasant's clothes in exchange for his own and is tied up and left by his attackers. He is freed by two peasant children and returns to headquarters, ashamed to have failed in his task. When he arrives, he is arrested as a spy, and when he is brought before the king he confronts a man who looks exactly like him and is wearing his stolen clothes. This impostor claims to be the real Ferdinand, and has been welcomed back as a hero for completing the dangerous mission. The king banishes Ferdinand, who returns to the Marchese's home. The Marchese recognizes him in spite of his altered appearance, but the imposter soon arrives and confounds the Marchese. He asks Adalinda to identify her betrothed, and she identifies the man with the cut on his hand.
Ferdinand, with nowhere else to go, returns to his estate, where he is once again met by the impostor. He is arrested and imprisoned. The impostor visits him in jail tells him that he has already married Adalinda, which is a lie. He offers to have him freed if he signs a statement acknowledging the imposter as the true Eboli, but Ferdinand refuses. He is sent away to fulfill his sentence but escapes with a fellow prisoner.
While Ferdinand is in jail, the Marchese dies, and Adalinda's marriage to Eboli is therefore delayed. As the weeks pass, Adalinda begins to suspect that the man she identified is not the real Ferdinand. She confronts him, and he reveals the truth, that he is Ferdinand's illegitimate older brother, and was raised by his jilted mother to one day take revenge upon his brother by stealing his identity. He tells Adalinda that she cannot escape, since he has replaced all of her attendants with his own people. She does manage to escape, however, by disguising herself as a page, but is forced to take shelter in what appears to be a banditto's cave after becoming lost in the woods. Two men appear: Ferdinand and his friend from prison, who have been leading a band of banditti following their escape from prison. One of their men capture the impostor in the wood as he looks for Adalinda.
Ferdinand and Adalinda seek help from Queen Caroline, who helps them bring the impostor before the King, who restores the real Ferdinand to his rights and fortune. He and Adalinda marry, and forgive the impostor, Ludovico. He joins the army and fights with his brother in Moscow, where Ludovico dies of exposure. Ferdinand would have suffered the same fate, but is captured by the enemy and eventually liberated after Napoleon's exile to Elba.
"Ferdinando Eboli" was first published in The Keepsake for 1829, a British literary annual. It was accompanied by an engraved illustration entitled Adalinda, painted by Alfred Edward Chalon and engraved by Charles Heath. [1] It was reprinted in several anthologies since, but is not widely read or studied. [2]
The Keepsake for 1829 is notable for its list of contributors, which includes many of the most popular writers and artists of the day, many of whom are canonical Romantic artists. [3]
"Ferdinando Eboli" is one of several Gothic tales that Mary Shelley published in The Keepsake . Others include "The Evil Eye" (1830), "Transformation" (1831), "The Invisible Girl" (1832), "The Dream" (1833), and "The Mortal Immortal" (1834). The central motif in this tale is the characteristic Gothic motif of the double, or doppelgänger, which Shelley also employs in "Transformation" and her novel Frankenstein. Other examples of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction that employ this motif include James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).
"Ferdinando Eboli" is often classified as a short story, but that term was not common in Britain until the 1880s. [4] It is more accurately categorized as a Gothic tale: one that describes a strange or supernatural experience, often by a first- or third-person narrator.
The Last Man is an apocalyptic, dystopian science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, which was first published in 1826. The book describes a future Earth at the time of the late 21st Century, ravaged by a new pandemic of a mysterious disease which quickly sweeps across the world, ultimately resulting in the near-decimation of all humanity. It also includes a discussion of English culture as a republic, with Mary Shelley sitting in meetings of the House of Commons to gain an insight into the governmental political system of the romantic era. Within the novel, she dedicates it highly to her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley who drowned in a shipwreck four years before the book's publication. It is also dedicated to her close friend Lord Byron who adored the Greek isles which were eventually his place of death, two years previously.
Ferdinand I, also called Ferrante, was King of Naples from 1458 to 1494. He was an illegitimate son of Alfonso V of Aragon.
Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. was an American imposter.
Charles III was Duke of Parma from 1849 to 1854.
"The Marriage of Sir Gawain" is an English Arthurian ballad, collected as Child Ballad 31. Found in the Percy Folio, it is a fragmented account of the story of Sir Gawain and the loathly lady, which has been preserved in fuller form in the medieval poem The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle. The loathly lady episode itself dates at least back to Geoffrey Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" from The Canterbury Tales. Unlike most of the Child Ballads, but like the Arthurian "King Arthur and King Cornwall" and "The Boy and the Mantle", "The Marriage of Sir Gawain" is not a folk ballad but a song for professional minstrels.
In fairy tales, a donor is a character that tests the hero and provides magical assistance to the hero when he or she succeeds.
Ferdinando may refer to:
The Orphan of the Rhine was a gothic novel by Eleanor Sleath, listed as one of the seven "horrid novels" by Jane Austen in her novel Northanger Abbey.
"Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot" is a children's story by the Romantic writer Mary Shelley. Written in 1820 for Laurette Tighe, a daughter of her friends Margaret King and George William Tighe, Mary Shelley tried to have it published by her father, William Godwin, but he refused. The text was lost until 1997, when a manuscript copy was discovered in Italy.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared in the second edition, which was published in Paris in 1821.
St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance is a Gothic horror novel written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1810 and published by John Joseph Stockdale in December of that year, dated 1811, in London anonymously as "by a Gentleman of the University of Oxford" while the author was an undergraduate. The main character is Wolfstein, a solitary wanderer, who encounters Ginotti, an alchemist of the Rosicrucian or Rose Cross Order who seeks to impart the secret of immortality. The book was reprinted in 1822 by Stockdale and in 1840 in The Romancist and the Novelist's Library: The Best Works of the Best Authors, Vol. III, edited by William Hazlitt. The novella was a follow-up to Shelley's first prose work, Zastrozzi, published earlier in 1810. St. Irvyne was republished in 1986 by Oxford University Press as part of the World's Classics series along with Zastrozzi and in 2002 by Broadview Press.
The Keepsake was an English literary annual which ran from 1828 to 1857, published each Christmas from 1827 to 1856, for perusal during the year of the title. Like other literary annuals, The Keepsake was an anthology of short fiction, poetry, essays, and engraved illustrations. It was a gift book designed to appeal to young women, and was distinctive for its binding of scarlet dress silk and the quality of its illustrations. Although the literature in The Keepsake and other annuals is often regarded as second-rate, many of the contributors to The Keepsake are canonical authors of the Romantic period.
"The Mortal Immortal" is a short story from 1833 written by Mary Shelley. It tells the story of a man named Winzy, who drinks an elixir which makes him immortal. At first, immortality appears to promise him eternal tranquility. However, it soon becomes apparent that he is cursed to endure eternal psychological torture, as everything he loves dies around him.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and feminist activist Mary Wollstonecraft.
Ratnadeep is a 1979 Hindi film written and directed by Basu Chatterjee. The film starred Hema Malini and Girish Karnad in lead roles. The film has music by Rahul Dev Burman with lyrics by Gulzar. The movie was reported to be based on a short story by Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay.
"The Evil Eye" is a piece of short fiction written by Mary Shelley and published in The Keepsake for 1830. The tale is set in Greece and is about a man known as Dmitri of the Evil Eye. Dmitri's wife was murdered and his daughter abducted many years before the story begins. Dmitri's friend Katusthius Ziani enlists him to help recover his rightful inheritance, and during their journey they abduct a boy whom Dmitri discovers to be his grandson.
Transformation is a short story written by Mary Shelley and first published in 1831 for The Keepsake. Guido, the narrator, tells the story of his encounter with a strange, misshapen creature when he was a young man living in Genoa, Italy, around the turn of the fifteenth century. He makes a deal with the creature to exchange bodies, but the creature does not reappear at the appointed time to take his own body back. Guido discovers that the creature is pretending to be him, kills it and therefore 'himself', and eventually awakens in his own body.
"The Dream" is a Gothic tale written by Mary Shelley and first published in The Keepsake for 1832. Set in France around the turn of the seventeenth century, it is the story of a young woman named Constance who is in love with Gaspar, the son of her father's enemy. Because their fathers killed each other in battle, Constance feels she cannot marry Gaspar, even though he loves her too. She spends a night on St. Catherine's Couch, a ledge of rock overlooking a river, in the hope that St. Catherine will offer her guidance in her dreams. She does, and Constance and Gaspar are married the next day.
The Invisible Girl is a Gothic tale written by Mary Shelley and first published in The Keepsake for 1833. The tale is set in Wales, and tells the story of a young woman named Rosina, who lives with her guardian, Sir Peter Vernon, and is secretly engaged to his son, Henry. Henry is away from home when their relationship is discovered, and Sir Peter casts Rosina out of the house. Sir Peter regrets his harshness and searches for her, but assumes she is dead when she cannot be found. Henry returns home to the news of Rosina's death and is heartbroken. He joins the search for her body, and the villagers tell him about the Invisible Girl, a ghostly figure who wanders the woods at night. Henry finds Rosina hiding in a remote ruin and discovers that she is really the Invisible Girl. Sir Peter forgives them for their secret engagement, and they are married.